Telus customers in Edmonton and northwest of the city experienced disruptions of several of the telecom giant’s services on Friday, including internet, mobile, phone and TV functions. On Friday afternoon, Telus reported mobile data, text and voice services outages in much of central Edmonton, the cause of them unknown. It said cable theft was to blame for incidents of Internet, phone, 911 and TV service disruption in the Bonnie Doon and Calder neighbourhoods. Less than a two-hour drive northwest of the capital city, several communities along Highway 43 near Edmonton – from Lac St. Anne northwest to Fox Creek – have had outages of several Telus services since Thursday afternoon. One of them is Mayerthorpe, where several businesses in the town of 1,400 put signs saying ‘cash only’ on their doors and windows or are closed because of the outage. Satya Patel, the owner and pharmacist of Mayerthorpe Value Drugmart, said her business “is solely dependent on Internet” and has few choices for sources of it. “Just because we are in a rural town, it’s very hard to get another internet provider, especially for pharmacies,” Patel told CTV News Edmonton on Friday, adding she’s had to turn away customers heading into the long weekend and plans to return to the pharmacy on her day off since many of them can’t contact her. “I can’t fill their prescription. People would like to get their medication. You can’t let them go without it. And I can’t (take payment.)” The telecom said the cause of the service disruption in the area is damage to Telus cables in Whitecourt on Thursday by a third-party excavator. The issue caused “temporary wireless service disruptions for customers in Northwestern Alberta, as well as a subset of internet and wireline voice customers throughout the region.” Other communities in the area affected by the Telus outage include Barrhead County, Big Lakes County, Lac Ste. Anne County, the Municipal District Of Greenview No. 16, Sangudo, Swan Hills, Woodlands County, Yellowhead County and an area south of Valleyview. Mayerthorpe Mayor Janet Jabush, who said would-be thieves broke into her storage unit during the outage but that nothing was taken, said Internet and mobile services in her community are already unreliable and that most residents rely on their cellphones because they don’t have landlines. “I’d hate to think that we had seniors without some sort of a way to get hold of emergency services if they needed to,” she told CTV News Edmonton. Telus said it has activated emergency roaming with a network partner to give customers access to 911 on their phones and to some wireless connection. With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Miriam Valdes-Carletti and Diego Romero
